10-Year Anniversary: Blogs Then and Now

Ten years ago this week, I started writing this blog as a fun diversion. If you will excuse an old man some navel-gazing, I'm going to throw up a few posts this week observing those ten years and how they changed beer, blogging, and me. (Aware that navel-gazing is innately repellent to those not in possession of said navel, I will try to make these reminisces relevant and interesting for everyone.)

Opening day at Hopworks Urban Brewery, one of the dozens
that have opened in Portland since I started blogging.

Ten years ago, as the Bush administration's second term was beginning to take on serious water, I was working as a researcher for Portland State University and most of my serious blogging time was spent on politics. Bloggers are far more sensitive to the attractions of their own minds than writers working for newspapers or magazines, so their interests and obsessions dot their output. Public policy was far more a feature of the early years on this blog, particularly with my focus on the beer tax and honest pints. (And I know from feedback at the time that the former was not an interest of readers.) It was almost entirely a blog about Oregon beer, and I spent most of my time talking about specific beer and breweries. Now things are ... different.

Blogs Then and Now
During that first five-year bloc (2006-2010), both beer and the media were going through a substantial change. When I started blogging, American craft breweries--basically the only category I was covering--numbered 1,400 and brewed around six million barrels of beer. There are now three times as many breweries and they're making around 25 million barrels of beer. That's obviously a huge change, but the change in media is even more profound. Twitter was founded a month after this blog and Facebook was still a college site. Blogs were still in their brief heyday as the alternative to legacy media but also occupied a quasi social-media role as convener of discussions. Everything existed on a far smaller scale then. I was blogging about a smaller beer world for a small, almost entirely local group for whom blogs were the main source of chat and discussion.

Looking backward, we can see that blogs were a transitional medium between legacy news media and social media. In the world of beer, that was especially important. A few newspapers still kept reporters on the beer beat, but they had in large part quit covering beer. Blogs were an avenue for what we might call "regular news": bloggers were where you went for information about events and new beer and breweries. We also provided a proto-social media function, offering opinion and discussion.

Social media changed the way beer news flows, but not entirely as I expected. It does some things far better than blogs, but--critically--it does some things far, far worse. People no longer go the blogs for discussion. They were never a great medium for that anyway; without a relationship to other commenters, the discussions were often rude or snide, and they often didn't go anywhere. With Facebook, we select our discussion partners in advance, so the discussions are more cordial and usually lead somewhere. But social media is a terrible place to post longer pieces, especially ones that you want to have lasting valence in the conversation of beer. Something goes on Twitter or Facebook, and it's gone in hours, lost in the miasma of words. Social media does a great job of recreating a virtual water cool; it's crap at recreating a virtual newspaper.

So over time blog content has begun to shift. Those who are doing durable, interesting stuff (current faves are folks like Boak and Bailey, Bryan Roth, Kendall Jones, and Good Beer Hunting) are getting eyeballs because we're not finding this on social media. (We are also enjoying a new golden age in professional media, though this time in the form of magazines like All About Beer, BeerAdvocate, and Draft Magazine.) Social media, desperate for something to discuss, devours good pieces. Three or four years ago, traffic here was nosediving, and I thought social media would destroy blogging. Now my traffic is far higher than its ever been, and it's clear the symbiosis between blogs and social media feeds each. It has meant that content has had to change, though. Longer pieces, more thoughtful pieces, analytical pieces--these are what people now go to blogs for.


The Blogger Then and Now
Of course, even if the medium had stayed the same, the blogger would have changed. At the start of 2010, I left Portland State and began writing books. I also began writing more articles and a year and a half ago began a roughly weekly blog at All About Beer. It's an estimate and may overstate things by 5-10%, but in this second half-decade of blogging, I wrote roughly half a million words. That's the stuff I got paid for and excludes everything on this blog. If your only connection to my writing comes through this blog, you might consider the last couple years a serious collapse in quality and frequency. I devoted less attention and less of my best ideas to this blog. (The people paying me got my best stuff.) But overall, the changes were mostly positive and, going forward, I think they'll start to appear here again.

A few of the specific changes:

• I'm more knowledgeable. I joke sometimes that when I was hired to write The Beer Bible I wasn't qualified. It's not a joke, though--I wasn't, really. (I'd have hired Stan Hieronymus or Randy Mosher.) Writing that book was like getting a graduate course in beerology. I lived and breathed beer for two years, studying, traveling, touring and discussing, and thinking about beer basically nonstop. If bloggers didn't have a warts-and-all approach, I'd delete most of my archives because I've learned how much I didn't know when I wrote them.
• My palate has changed. Admittedly, this was already underway, but I was far less focused on mild, low-alcohol beers before I swam in them in (particularly) Britain, Germany, and the Czech Republic. I still drink IPAs and American sours, but far less than I used to. I write less about them, too.
• The blog is more international. Again, as a result of travel, I got to see inside some of the world's great breweries. It made me more Europe-focused at exactly the time Americans were moving away from imports. 
• The audience has changed. Thanks to the two preceding bullets, I started getting readers from around the world, not just around the state. Although I am still relatively small fry as a voice in the beer world, writing books has exposed me to a larger audience. In 2008, the average reader of this blog was a Portland beer geek. He was probably a he, probably a homebrewer, and quite likely another blogger. I used shorthand a lot when I wrote because the audience wasn't so diverse. (Indeed, that probably reinforced who came to the site.) Now people find me from all over. I'm sure the majority are still quite knowledgeable, but there's a substantial and group who are new to beer. It means I don't write like I'm talking to friends nor do I assume the reader knows what technical terms are.
• I'm spread more thinly. I don't have as much time to devote to this blog. My goal is to post 15-20 times a month, which would be a step up over the 12 I averaged over the past two years (but well below the 1.5 posts a day I averaged in 2009). I could write more if I padded the blog with fluff pieces, but I'm also hoping to improve the quality. I do think my posts are, compared to 2008, more accurate. People don't care anymore if you're posting two or three posts a week instead of ten, so long as they're good and substantive. I endeavor to make them so.

Peering into the past is a misleading endeavor. The near-past looks a lot more like the present than it really was. You have to start going back two or three decades in your mind's eye, to a time when the world looked like a quaintly odd place of giant cell phones, squarish cars, and weird fashion. There you find radical differences, like the absence of the internet. But a decade? Seems basically the same. But memories lie. The granular details of life--using our smart phones to mediate so many different experiences, staying connected through social media, unplugging from television--most of us weren't doing these things a decade ago.

We have that same myopia when we look forward a decade. It'll basically look the same, we figure, except for a few minor improvements here or there. That's almost certainly wrong. I fully expect to have a car service that ferries me around in a self-driving smart car. It will take me to and from pubs, and on the way I'll be able to use my neural implant to chat with friends via Mindbook. That will be handy, since another 327 breweries will have opened in Portland by then. The cool thing is, I'll be able to use that time more profitably, likesay by blogging while in transit.

See you there--

It's Hard Out There For a Publisher

This is a slightly random aside, but I wanted to draw your attention to a great post about the state of the internet over at Talking Points Memo. For those of you who don't read political blogs for fun, TPM may have escaped your notice. It's a left-of-center site that grew out of a personal blog by Josh Marshall. (As an aside to the aside, the site was my introduction to blogging. I'd never heard the word "blog" until Paul Krugman called attention to some of the work Marshall had been doing on the coded racist words of then Majority Leader Trent Lott. Within a month, I had started my first blog.) Like all news/opinion sites, it has struggled in the age of social media.

What's changed in the last 4 to 5 years is the inroads social media sites have made into the paid advertising space. Much as Craigslist virtually destroyed the classified ads business that local newspapers owned, a site like Facebook can deliver ads more efficiently and cheaply than most traditional advertisers. 

The great liberation brought about by the internet made it possible for someone like me to put my voice in front of (potentially) the whole world--a phenomenon new in the world. But if you envision the structure of media as a funnel, where the voices of the public are the wide end, and the media gatekeepers act as the narrow end, what happened with the internet--and especially, with social media--was the elimination of that narrowing. Now all people can connect with all people, which means the writer in this equation isn't very important anymore. Josh' perspective is that of he publisher, but since we can all now be publishers as well as writers, it may be a distinction without a difference. Writers and publishers are still casting around now to figure out how to make a living. Many of us develop nervous tics because it seems like our societal value is approaching zero. Though from a purely academic perspective, the changes are fascinating.

Which I suppose is about as good a place to segue to links as any. Today at All About Beer I discuss a significant epiphany I had in Miami, Florida on the subject of beer. True story.

So join me back in the Abbey Brewing pub. Most beer culture in the world right now has its roots in European brewing. Abbey reflected that—with a healthy dose of American sprinkled in. As I mentioned, Miami is loaded with culturally-specific businesses, so there’s nothing out of the ordinary about a European-American pub making up part of the tapestry. And yet, in that moment, I realized how much American beer culture—especially craft beer culture—carries with it this European valence.

We also have the latest Beervana Podcast up and ready to caress your ears in our dulcet tones. In this latest episode, we discuss wintry beers, touching on topics like wassail, Lamb's wool, glühkriek, bière de Noël, and of course, price elasticities. We have also slightly tweaked the format to include news and beer recommendations (an extension of the "Beer Sherpa" feature birthed here on this blog) as well as a a "mailbag" feature, in which we are attempting to draw you into the discussion. We welcome questions, comments, criticisms, witticisms--anything that inspires you. Email us at the_beerax @ yahoo.com.

The Future of Blogging

It occurred to me over the weekend that January marked my ten-year anniversary of blogging.  I'm spending this week considering the changes I've seen in that epoch of technology. (And I'm almost done with this indulgence!)

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Time was the world was starved enough for beer content that the blogger merely had to write a post about the most recent beer he'd tasted.  Readers!  Back in the halcyon days of about 2009--beer blogging was trailing trends in other subjects--bloggers sorted themselves out among type: the reviewer, the gossip, the tracker-of-events, the homebrewer, the garbage scow of random info (my niche).  In order to get a sense of all this stuff, you needed to traffic several blogs.  If you were interested in national trends, you trafficked a few more.


The need for these sources died out a year or two back, as the internet got better at organizing information through social media.  There are now tons of ways to get info--Facebook and Twitter, and sites like Reddit, BeerPulse, and BeerAdvocate.  There's no reason to seek out info about events or reviews, no point in visiting sites that just repeat information.  We all now have ways of sorting our social media to receive the information we want.  Three or four years ago, there were dozens of very active beer blogs around the country (and a good 15 in Oregon).  Many have been abandoned or have gone nearly still.  As a blogger, I get why: what's the point of spending time on a blog people have abandoned for Twitter?


There is one very large exception to this rule: the expert blog.  Sites like those hosted by Ron Pattinson, Martyn Cornell, and Stan Hieronymus are more than relevant.  They are in many ways the backbone of the entire social media superstructure.  Social media feeds on content, and there's more than enough of pseudo-content we all despise.  Modern online media has inclined in this direction where they produce listicles, slide shows, and random "what's-the-best-IPA"-type pieces.  These drive traffic, but they are obvious padding.  What we really want to see are meaty topics discussed deeply.  Experts can put these out, but obviously not in the volume the internet requires.  Collected together they do a better job.


What I've found is that every post I write generates clicks.  But some are almost self-defeating.  If you sucker people into a click for a fiber-free post often enough, people quit clicking.  If, however, you try to make sure the content is original, unusual, and interesting, people will read.*  Even this post, which I know is going to be interesting to only 2.3% of the people who start reading it, is at the very least not the kind of thing you read everywhere.  I've never been interesting in a focused way like Martyn and Ron, but among the detritus of a garbage scow, you do find the occasional gem.

Blogs will survive, but over time a higher percentage of them will be written by experts who depend on massive, social-media generated traffic when they put up one of their relatively infrequent (but fascinating!) posts.  For new bloggers, it is both a warning and an invitation.  If you have special insight and information on a topic, social media will help you find readers, probably quickly.  If you are writing more general stuff from a layman's perspective, the sledding may a lot tougher than it was even a few years ago.




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*There is the question of audience.  Beervana, for example, had an almost exclusively local readership.  People wanted to read about Northwest beer.  Then I started writing a book about the beers of the world and quit covering Oregon beer very closely, which I believe drove some people away.  German readers might care what Hans-Peter Drexler and Matthias Trum have to say, but fewer Oregonians do, so my posts about Europe, while in many cases not uninteresting, were not well-directed to a local audience.  I do hope to get back to more local content in a few months.

The Blogger Versus Hive Mind

It occurred to me over the weekend that January marked my ten-year anniversary of blogging.  I'm spending this week considering the changes I've seen in that epoch of technology.

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Okay, imagine if you will, a time in which information was managed by corporate gatekeepers.  In this distant dystopia (Y2K), there were lots of things in the world we didn't know anything about.  Let me rock your world.  As the new millennium dawned, we staggered forth without the light of Wikipedia.  Imagine that.  Never mind being able to Yelp the best Thai restaurant within 2 miles of our present location--we couldn't find out totally basic information, like what that rule is called when someone inappropriately invokes Hitler as an analogy for a minor crime (Godwin's law).  We were truly lost souls.

Into this world, the blogger swaggered like a little god.  She was the usurper, the destroyer of gatekeeping.  She challenged the conventional wisdom of how things were covered and perhaps more importantly, which things were covered.  This was the gatekeeper's secret, hidden power. If a newspaper decided to cover subject X in their paper, the dictates of dead-tree media meant they couldn't devote column-space to Y.  The blogger reported subject Y.  Equally as radically, the blogger was an integrationist.  Gatekeepers never had to show their work; they reported the news in that clinical Voice of God style, pretending to inhabit a Platonic plane of pure objectivity.  Bloggers, on the other hand, linked stuff.  They did the same things reporters did (the good ones, anyway), but they allowed the reader to check their sources in real time.  They were responsive to readers and used them to create dialogue--another radical departure from the MSM's purely didactic model.

For about two years, from the start of 2003 through the end of 2004, blogging upended the way we thought about information.  We went from an "experts" model to a "citizens" model.  This wasn't only a media phenomenon, experts were really under the gun then--think of the failures leading to 9/11 and the debacle of the Iraq war was unfolding in front of us.  The experts who had access to information had failed us (both media and government), and there was a battle for control over who should control information.  Bloggers by dint of not being experts had a kind of instant credibility, and for a short time, everyone was really keen to hear what they had to say. 

(Although my lens is heavily tinted by the colors of politics--the blogging I was doing at the time--this dynamic was happening in every realm.  Citizen bloggers, with new-fangled digital cameras, were becoming instant paparazzi and challenging the entertainment press; sports bloggers were covering teams with the kind of obsessiveness the fans recognized and enjoyed, etc and so on.) 

In the mid-aughts, bloggers reached detente with the MSM and actually became mainstream.  I remember getting my first press invite to a beer event in 2006.  It helped that I had previously worked for the MSM, but pretty quickly bloggers across the city were treated as regular media.  And why not?  As information moved from dead trees to the internet, stories about a brewery were accessed by a different gatekeeper, Google, and it didn't matter if the story appeared on beervana.blogspot.com or nytimes.com--Google would find it. The distinction between blogging and reporting, by about 2008, was so small that it almost became an academic point.*

Where things really took a turn away from the citizen blogger was by the late aughts, as software developers began to harness the power of hive mind.  The problem with information had inverted itself; no longer was their too little information, guarded by a few powerful gatekeepers, now there was way, way too much information.  Developers figured out how to turn that into a wonderful tool for crowdsourcing.  One of the constant questions in an information-saturated environment is "which?"  Which car is best, which new band is best, which restaurant is best?  Bloggers lost their privileged places as ratings sites took over.  We had demonstrated that citizens' information is as valuable as experts', and thereby made ourselves (mostly) obsolete.  Most bloggers don't mess with reviews anymore, and this is why.  (I have been tasting a whole bunch of new beers and will buck convention soon with some reviews.) 

People now like to read things in very short, digestible bursts and they do it on sites like Reddit and Twitter.  They scan a stream of voices, looking for the one that interests them.  Well over half my traffic now comes from referrals from these kinds of sites.  The habit of slowly going from blog to blog looking to see if there's anything new there--what kind of nonsense is that?  The blogger will tweet and Facebook when she's got new content for me to see.  Or I'll see it in RSS. 

Tomorrow I'll discuss what kinds of blogs remain valuable and why.  But for today, I wanted to leave you with the sense of what it's like blogging in 2013 as opposed to 2003.  The world has changed, the way we consume information has changed, and media has changed.  Blogs have not changed--not much, anyway.  Trying to elbow your way through the cacophony is a completely different challenge than trying to muscle your way past a gatekeeper.  My traffic is as good as it ever was, but in the flattening of the information earth, there is a diminution that happens to us all.  We are little nodes now, pixel flashes that are but one tiny piece of an immense picture of information we consume daily.  It's a really, really different world.  More on that world tomorrow. 

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go tweet this post so you can find it. 
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*The consequences of all these changes, profound, would make a great book.  I'll spare you.